Re: guix on nfs based systems

[Etienne B. Roesch]

Hi!

A quick follow up on that, as I have had some discussions with a few of
you, and also my IT department.

*Context*: at the University of Reading, we have that facility that allows
the deployment of vms on-demand to the campus. I work primarily on
reproducibility in science, and managed to convince our IT dept to provide
guix as default to all users.

*Hiccups*: we provide home dirs as nfs drives through the network. Using
guix, we are thinking of creating one nfs drive, shared by all users, to
contain /var/guix and /gnu/store, symlinked from /.
As I understand, that should work, until a user decides to run "guix gc"
(which would clear wrongly assumed unused profiles) or maybe until a user
decides to launch several vms (which is theoretically possible, but doesn't
happen often).

Efraim suggested using a shared daemon ssh-ing GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET. We would
probably run this on a separate vm. We are however unsure how it would
behave when /var/guix/daemon-socket/socket is itself on an nfs.

In theory, it should work, right? Are we missing something?

Thanks a ton!

Etienne



On Sun, Nov 26, 2023 at 7:36 AM Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il>
wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 24, 2023 at 06:08:30PM +0000, Etienne B. Roesch wrote:
> > Hahaha! Yes, that's what I was getting at!
> >
> > I suppose one could run gc periodically, in a monthly cron. No?
> >
> > Etienne
> >
> > On Thu, Nov 23, 2023 at 1:03 PM Felix Lechner <
> felix.lechner@lease-up.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Hi Efraim,
> > >
> > > On Thu, Nov 23 2023, Efraim Flashner wrote:
> > >
> > > > One thing we do on the small cluster at UTenn is /gnu and /var/guix
> (in
> > > > addition to the home directories) are exported across NFS
> > >
> > > That's fascinating! Do you ever run 'guix gc', or do you just buy new
> > > disks when space runs low?
> > >
> > > Kind regards (and perhaps, happy Thanksgiving)
> > > Felix
>
> We generally run it as necessary, but luckily not too often.  With
> everyone trained to use profiles we rarely have problems with necessary
> packages disappearing.  I've generally been the biggest offender with
> building and rebuilding packages while packaging new software.
>
> --
> Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   רנשלפ םירפא
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